


Somnambulism

by rallamajoop



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superpowers, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 16:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallamajoop/pseuds/rallamajoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somnambulism

The first time they meet, the point man shoots him in the head. Eames tries not to take it personally.  


* * *

It takes a second meeting to leave a lasting impression, the main impression being the singular fact they get to have a second meeting.

It isn't the point man's face Eames recognises first – much later, he's going to be ashamed to realise he hadn't paid even passing attention to the his face first time around – it's the way he moves. The finest nuance of someone's posture can be as good as a fingerprint to the trained eye (it's certainly worse than a neon warning sign if you get it wrong), but Eames would have to admit that a lifetime of cultivating an appreciation for nuance becomes a little redundant when you're seeing a man run straight up the side of a building as though gravity were something that only happened to other people. He'd seen wall-crawlers before in his line of work, but this one had style. It had seemed a crying shame to see it all go to waste.

Eames had not actually cried over it. Maybe sighed wistfully a bit. He always did prefer to work with professionals.

So when he catches sight of someone scaling a fire escape below him without setting a foot on any of the stairs, his first thought, give or take a touch of not-even-grudging admiration, is, there's another one? As the someone (man, definitely a man) gets closer, he revises this to, they must have worked with the same trainer, ignores the whisper of adrenaline that shivers his way up his spine, and after that he's too busy moving to intercept to listen to what all those cultivated instincts are trying to tell him he's seen.

He has his gun trained on the spot where the man's head is going to pop up over the top of the wall a comfortable several seconds before it does, but in that crucial moment that he'd marked for getting this over with neatly, he sets his eyes on the man's face, and freezes. He honestly hadn't had the faintest idea he'd gotten a good enough look at the face of the last wall-crawler to recognise it again until he's doing it.

In the lists of suicidal mistakes one can make while looking into the face of someone who could beat your elevator to the roof of a multi-story building and still have time to adjust his cuffs, straighten his tie and select his favourite silencer before the doors open, this is so close to the top that it doesn't matter, and the only thing that saves Eames is that the other man has just done the exact same thing. It's an unspeakable relief to see his confusion mirrored in the offending party's face; in part, yes, because he hasn't been shot (again) (yet), but mostly because it's the best tell available that he hasn't gone insane.

Eames, master at making himself sound exactly how he needs to sound, is at a bit of a loss as to why his tone comes out so conversational when he says, "You know, I could have sworn I shot you the other night." Yes, there'd only been a split second between seeing the other man raise his gun and hearing the shot, and no, he hadn't been in a state to see whether he'd hit his mark afterwards, and no, he hadn't gone back to check, but Eames is a very good shot.

The other man reaches for his gun, and the rest of the encounter (all point-three-five seconds) is depressingly familiar. Eames is not sure what other reaction he expected.

It takes him most of a minute to pull himself together, spitting the bullet into his palm. He'd kept quite a collection of specimens like it once upon a time, in memory of deaths cheated. Nowadays, he counts it as a greater victory if he can avoid getting shot in the first place. He usually throws them away.

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and takes a moment to appreciate his own hypocrisy. The explanation is poetically obvious, no matter how unsatisfying – in one night, not just to be faced with the fact you're not the beautiful and unique snowflake you thought, but that the other guy somehow managed to wrangle anti-gravity powers into the bargain. The question is still there, how neither of them saw or heard the other getting up and creeping away last time they went through this, but in the face of all the other evidence it's probably just flagrant denial. He should probably spend his effort being glad he's up first.

He keeps his gun trained on the other man as he approaches, all the time expecting – something. Any sign of life, really. When several minutes have passed without so much as a twitch, he kneels carefully and wraps his fingers around the wrist of one outflung arm.

It's definitely a body, and – inasmuch as he's qualified to tell in this uncertain world – it's definitely dead.

"You're really not fooling anyone," he tells it.

The body begs to differ.

He entertains the idea of lugging it home with him for the scientists to have a poke at for about five seconds before he remembers that he's not nearly enough of a masochist to bother. It doesn't take much longer for him to decide he's had exactly as much scouting as he can take for one night.

For all he knows, the other man got lucky the first time. Somehow.

He slips the bullet into a pocket as he turns away. It's not sentimentality; within an hour or two, he's going to need physical evidence to convince himself this wasn't all some crazy dream.

* * *

Once may be chance, twice coincidence, but three times can only be conspiracy.

"You and I have got to stop meeting like this," says Eames.

The other man shoots him three times in the chest, and has just time to look surprised when Eames returns the favour on his way down.

* * *

Three nights of running scouting excursions and nothing to show for it but the very real concern that either his own mind or the universe at large is misbehaving in ways he should be worried about leave Eames feeling a little unprofessional. He has Thoughts – the kind requiring a capital 'T' – on the subject of professionalism in his field. He was a thief before he ever discovered he had the capacity to become a good forger, and he had years of experience in forgery under his belt before he became... whatever you call what he is now. So long as there's only the one of him he doesn't suppose it needs a name, other than the one he's in the habit of using nowadays.

Somewhere along that line, the majority of the work available for professionals in his field started to feel easy, in a disconcerting sort of way that was difficult to enjoy as much as he ought; even getting the chance to show off his many talents to a captive audience lost its lustre some time ago. In the same manner that surviving a bullet wound has ceased to be nearly as satisfying as finishing a job without getting shot, the pride he used to feel at pulling off a particularly flawless forgery pales next to that of pulling off the job using no-one's face but his own, and part of that, yes, is nothing more than pride, misplaced or otherwise, but part is prudence (what they don't know you can do they can't prepare for, not to mention the part where he never has been any good at holding form through a headshot), and only a little is for personal reasons of a sort he rarely remembers to examine except when drunk and maudlin at odd hours of the morning. But leftover at the end is still a part – no matter that he's in the sort of profession that set him up against someone who shot barbs out of their fingertips while hanging from the ceiling on his last job – where it just doesn't seem fair otherwise.

If there is a good chance the job will involve getting shot at, he prefers to work alone. That has very little to do with pride, and everything to do with the wretched guilt of watching some poor bastard get gunned down beside you while the worst you can complain of is having to play dead for a few minutes with a bullet under you tongue until everyone turns their backs. If that sort of sentiment is unprofessional of him, then professionalism can go hang.

Nevertheless, after three nights spent achieving only the questionable result of having put the enemy security even more on edge, he isn't feeling like he has much to be proud of.

"Let's talk about that offer of sending in some of your people as support," he says to the men who are paying him that rather ridiculous sum to pull off this job.

"As backup?" they say.

"I was thinking more along the lines of as a distraction," says Eames.

"How many do you need?" they ask him.

Eames remembers the wall-crawler who found him three times and should, by rights, have had him outgunned at least once, and tries to think of a way to phrase the answer that doesn't come out to the effect of, "How many do you mind losing in one go?"

* * *

They enter the maze at the same time, from different entry points. They're not ten minutes in before he gets the radio message to say the first team has found trouble. Eames doesn't ask whether it's the kind of trouble that runs at you up the side of a building; he's of two minds regarding whether he wants it to be, though considering the speed with which the point man found one intruder on the last few nights, it seems more or less inevitable.

Nevertheless, it doesn't really cross his mind that it could be anyone else when, hardly minutes later, a bullet impacts on the masonry not two inches from his left arm and sends Eames diving around the nearest corner. There he stops and waits, gun drawn, while two more bullets hit the ground where he was standing half a second previously. It's a sorry excuse for cover, but there's nothing better available, and he's capable of being realistic about his odds of outrunning the man who's chasing him.

By the fourth gunshot he's starting to feel insulted. Does that fool really think he's going to stick his head out back there if he keeps it up?

"Einstein, smart chap that he was, had an interesting way of defining of insanity; you might want to look it up when you've got a moment," he hollers.

The shooting stops.

"Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?" says the point man.

Eames feels suddenly light-headed. Now would probably be a very bad time to make a pithy comment like, 'Oh, you do talk, I was beginning to wonder.' There's something important about that voice that he's sure he's missing, but here he is, unable to get past the fact he's hearing it at all.

"On the other hand," says the point man, without obvious malice, "doing it over a couple of times to make certain is a pretty good definition of the scientific method. Einstein could've told you a few things about that too."

Something he's missing – like, for example, the fact that voice is coming from over his head. Oh.

Eames has just long enough to take in the sight of a man-sized shadow hanging upside-down from a window ledge above before being shot in the shoulder with a tranquilliser dart. He's dutifully impressed; it doesn't work – his body spits the drug back out just as fast as everything else it doesn't like – but he can't think of anyone else who's tried that one on him before.

He staggers under the impact, but it's ninety percent theatrics, staged to buy himself the time to get his own gun to an angle where he can return fire. He gets another three darts in the same arm for his trouble. The point man throws himself sideways out of the path of Eames' first shot, but the second gets him in the leg and gravity – joining the party late – does the rest.

He rolls on the landing and almost makes it back up before Eames' next bullet gets him in the back of the head. He goes down without a sound.

Several seconds go past before Eames moves, mentally getting his breath back. Then he makes himself walk up to the body, rolls it unceremoniously onto its back and checks its pulse, first on the wrist and again on the neck. No surprises.

"What am I going to do with you?" he asks aloud, but it's mostly habit; he's really not in the mood anymore. In the last week he's been shot twice in the head, three times in the chest and now four times with tranquillisers – and even if the point man's methods are getting further from effectiveness rather than the reverse, there's more at work here than random luck. He'd admitted exactly as much not a minute ago.

The scientific method, hm? thinks Eames Well, two can quip on that topic.

Eames reaches for his radio.

"I've changed my mind. I want that backup here. Tell them to bring a stretcher."

The backup looks rather disappointed when they find out he's not injured.

They look even more displeased when they find out he wants them to lug a human body back to base and he won't tell them why.

* * *

There's a saying in the forgery business: You don't have to be bisexual to work here, but it helps. In some parts of the world, the march of memetic mutation has rendered it into something more along the lines of: If you're not when you start, you will be by the end of the year. The implication in either version is that anything else would be doing it wrong. Like most witty generalisations it's not in any sense true, but it does betray a couple of very basic truths about the nature of the business – if you don't go in with a certain curiosity about people, a certain willingness to try (for lack of a less weighted term) 'new things', you're unlikely to go very far.

Out of the fraction of a percent of the population born with the fundamental physiological malleability one needs to mould their body at will, only an even smaller fraction are cut out for true forgery. There's plenty that can be done to modify the human body that has nothing to do with the need to pass as human, let alone as someone specific. Eames has known people who can compress themselves until they can slide through a crack in a wall barely two inches wide, grow bone spurs from their knuckles, stretch their limbs until they stand fifteen feet tall and all manner of other stomach-turning tricks. There are limits, of course; mass is a constant that even shape shifters are limited to gaining or losing by the usual methods, and there is only so far one can deform the human body and still have it function (something more than a few learn the hard way). There are side effects to contend with as well; it's a rare thing to meet a flesh sculptor with more than a year or two's experience in the business who hasn't developed some quirk about their features that tips them a little way down the side of the uncanny valley – face too stiff, eyes just a little too far apart, mouth that spreads just a little bit too wide when they smile. It's the job that comes with complimentary botox, as the joke goes, which is almost polite when you consider that plastic surgery has nothing on what shapeshifting can do to your features.

This is only one of many points of contention fuelling the contempt that most of the professional forging community holds over those who specialise in using their talents in a less subtle capacity (as if they ever needed any more justification for rivalry than being the superpowered equivalent of the split between rugby and football, or knitting and crochet). Say what you like about forgery as a profession, it's obvious no proper forger would ever forget how to make themselves look human. (Relatively few forgers will readily admit that flesh-sculpting is among those 'new things' they had tried but found themselves ill-suited to.)

In retrospect it's a shame that there hadn't been more dialogue between the two factions, or maybe someone in the forgery business might have guessed a little sooner that, like so many obvious things, this was a generalisation doomed to be proven false in every possible regard.

Eames has rarely found cause to regret having come to the business late. He's always found learning from other people's mistakes to be infinitely preferable to learning from one's own.

* * *

"Would you like to tell me why you brought back a human body?" says Mr Charles when Eames gets back.

"Oh, it's not for you, it's for your science team," says Eames. After spending the last twenty minutes following a corpse home and jumping half out of his skin every time the motion of the stretcher had made it twitch suspiciously he is far too tired and far too fed up for diplomacy. "I thought I'd get them something to show my appreciation for how helpful they've been."

The thin line of Charles' mouth speaks of a whole world of objections warring to be the first one out.

"But since we're talking," Eames goes on, "tell me something: your suspicions about this 'top secret research' going on in that facility, do they in any way involve human cloning?"

When you're as good with body language as Eames is, it's plain embarrassing to see someone go pale that obviously right in front of you.

"I'll get them on it right away," he says.

"Good man," says Eames.

* * *

"Call me Mr Charles," is the first thing the man hiring him on behalf of Mr Fischer had said when they met.

The way he'd pronounced 'Mr Charles' made it such an obvious alias that Eames had momentarily entertained the idea that this was all a double bluff and that was actually his real name. He and his assistants were serious men in serious suits, and they all fitted the stereotype of the same to such an astonishing degree that Eames was occasionally surprised to be reminded that none of them actually made a habit of wearing sunglasses indoors. He could just tell they were going to hate each other.

He hadn't met Mr Fischer. It was made clear he wasn't going to meet Mr Fischer at all, and that if pressed, Mr Fischer could be expected to deny any knowledge that anyone meeting Eames' description was working for him or any of his subsidiaries in any capacity, and this may well have been true. Mr Fischer is a powerful man who wants a particularly difficult job done for him, and he's rich enough not to have to care how. Eames has the idea that if it weren't for the sake of attaching a high profile name to this job he wouldn't have heard Fischer's name at all – even allowing that a lot of what gave the name its high profile status are probably not the most welcome of reasons.

At least a couple of years must have passed since the worst of the media storm blew over, but it's going to be a lot longer than that before anyone who lived through the collapse of Fischer-Morrow will readily associate the name with anything else. The true poetry shall always remain in the timing, when what had been anticipated as perhaps a slight stock drop in the wake of Maurice Fischer's death turned into the entire conglomerate going belly-up overnight, for reasons that, underneath enough economic jargon to fill a whole season's worth of financial gossip columns and late night talk shows, are still essentially shrouded in mystery to this day. The best conspiracy theories go so far as to propose the old man planned the whole thing as his last laugh against the world.

"The Mr Fischer?" Eames had asked.

"Was buried in a private ceremony two years ago," he was told, as though there were real chance he could actually be that stupid. "We're authorised to retain your services on behalf of the junior Mr Fischer, R-"

"Robert, yes, right," Eames had returned, "you may have missed my meaning there, but when I said 'the Mr Fischer', I was in fact referring to the remaining Mr Fischer, distinguished by, as you point out, still being alive." It's certainly not as though Robert's name hadn't had its own share of news time, what with his father leaving the son who was to inherit his empire with naught to his name but a multi-million dollar trust fund stocked with the riches to allow any man to live in relative luxury to the end of his days. Eames does not recall feeling particularly sorry for him when the story broke, though if it's been this many months and his own lackeys still haven't learned to think of him as 'the' Mr Fischer yet, Eames has to allow that maybe the poor sod does deserve some kind of pity.

Most of Robert Fischer's remaining luck had probably been expended simply getting out of being personally indicted for any part of what went down. By the time everything was dying down though he'd come under just enough real suspicion and scrutiny that it would take a very determined conspiracy theorist to seriously doubt that everything that happened had come as just as much a shock to him as to the rest of the world. Indeed, it's a mystery which Eames quickly learns he's still very much invested in solving, and it seems that an awful lot of ex-employees of one of those more mysterious Fischer-Morrow subsidiaries have turned up in the employ of a discrete research facility in South Africa owned by Proclus Global, a company which has done very well for itself in the wake of its chief competitor's demise. Which is a bit like observing that the wolves will do well for themselves once you've cleared the cheetahs out of their range, really, but one can hardly say the younger Mr Fischer doesn't have reason to be suspicious.

The situation is thus:

Eighteen months earlier, an area measuring roughly two square kilometres on the outskirts of Johannesburg was leased 'for redevelopment' by Proclus Global. If what they've done with it since is half as interesting as the history of the region, then the next item on their agenda will probably involve pitching the film rights.

The original lease on the area, then more than an hour west of the city limits, was held by a mining company by the name of Milton Deep. By the time the area's mineral wealth had run out, urban sprawl had caught up with them, and the directors were only too pleased to refit what remained of their facilities and sell up at a profit before the whole region was swallowed up into the maw of an encroaching industrial zone, following which it enjoyed a good three years of booming production before the honeymoon period came abruptly to an end. In light of what later became evident about Milton's shining legacy it's a wonder the boom lasted that long before suddenly the excavation for a new basement was inexplicably managing to undermine the wall all the way on the other side of the street, and there were cracks forming just under all the roofs on the other side of town as the foundations sloped very slightly sideways, and all the while it was getting harder not to notice that the edge of the main pit that all the regulators had signed off as unconditionally stable was getting closer by the month, not to mention a dozen other warning signs that, to their credit, most of the more mobile businesses spotted for what they were relatively quickly, and had themselves well into the process of clearing out before it had even made the news.

At any rate, productivity in the area was well past its peak by the time the earthquake actually hit and half the remaining foundations all liquefied at once. Realistically, the quake probably didn't do much worse than to speed up the inevitable, but it certainly got them there by the most dramatic means possible.

By the time the new batch of regulators, these ones more thoroughly certified and rather less well paid, had been through and declared the worst of the settlement was over this time and reconstruction – within more careful limits – was possible again, no-one wanted anything more to do with the place. Miles of chain-link fence and bold placards declaring the whole area condemned haven't done a thing to dissuade a population of several thousand squatters from moving into any remaining building which hadn't completely sunk into the mud, but anyone with real money had taken one look at the sordid history of the place and decided to invest it somewhere more historically stable.

Until eighteen months ago, when Proclus had showed up with a generous offer to take the whole area off the government's hands and walked away with all the deeds by the end of the week. The official propaganda had been full of cheer about the possibilities of urban renewal, which came closer to being dirty words in a land where the first stage of 'urban renewal' invariably involved evicting the current residents from the gutter they'd been eking out their living in and transplanting them all somewhere worse. Given the spin quota in all those glossy leaflets it hadn't been particularly remarkable that over a year has now passed without much sign of any real urban renewal going on. What's more remarkable is that in that time not more than a handful of the previous residents seem to have been asked to leave. It's understood that somewhere inside, well away from any edges, Proclus have found something with walls that still stands on its own and set up shop, arranged to have private security instated and all the amenities reconnected, and have since proceeded to run up a slightly terrifying electricity bill for a facility of their size, but done little else. They pay their bills and even their taxes, with a regularity and enthusiasm that Eames finds rather suspicious, and have been responsible for a lot of helicopter traffic over the heads of the squatters, but otherwise the city probably hardly knows they're there.

"I can see why you're worried about what they might be up to in there," Eames had said. "They sound absolutely despicable."

Eames had watched Mr Charles consciously suppressing two different nervous ticks while his assistant said, "You of all people, Mr Eames, should be aware that one's public face and one's private are rarely one and the same."

"I'm not sure I like what you're implying about me," said Eames, tone light and glib, but it had been hardly even worth remarking that there were only a very few plausible reasons why a corporate entity would choose to set up a research facility in the middle of a thrice-condemned South African slum, and when they were known to be already in the act of flying most of their staff in by private helicopter every morning, cost was no longer among them.

Then there's the fact that the security involved – even for a site located on the outskirts of a city internationally known for its crime rate – sits somewhere in that region between 'excessive' and 'insane'. Proclus may not be so draconian that their employees don't get any time off to spend in the outside world; Fischer's people have managed to find out a lot about their employees (and while surveillance footage alone will always be second-best to meetings one's marks in person, the level of detail they've gotten out of it would impress any forger) but how to put it all to use is a more difficult problem. That Proclus has taken precautions to protect virtually everyone in their employ from the possibility of telepathic espionage more or less goes without saying in this day and age. Out of the entire company, Mr Charles had managed to find a total of exactly one janitor who hadn't had the ubiquitous TF chip implanted in the base of his skull, and all attempts at exploiting this only made it clear that he hadn't any more idea what's going on in there than they did.

Of more concern is that among what little is known about what goes on inside the compound there's the fact that every employee allowed on site, from the scientists to the pilots to the lunch staff, is subjected to retinal scans, fingerprinting and weight checks as a matter of signing in in the morning, and Eames doesn't know a single forger in the business who can reliably pass all three. Getting oneself on the staff legitimately is an even more impossible task; Proclus Global has made it very clear they are not hiring. Not for permanent positions, and not on a temporary basis, and not even if three of their five pilots have mysteriously come down with food poisoning on the same day. Eames doesn't know whether to be impressed or offended.

Traditional subterfuge is not going to work. Mr Charles and his associates have already gone to considerable expense making sure of this. They're resorting instead to good old fashioned thievery, which means sending people to approach the facility under cover of darkness and sneak, or, if necessary, break in. Beyond that point more or less anything Eames can discover about what's going on inside will be more than Fischer's associates know already, provided he can get it back to them. Even the task of getting a half-decent set of candid photographs of the facility from the outside had taken many weeks of failed attempts for barely adequate results.

With that admission, what ought to be a relatively straight-forward plan rapidly begins to fall apart as it becomes clear that the only available blueprints predate all post-quake refurbishments – if they are in fact the blueprints for the right buildings – and the only information they've got on what to expect within was extracted from the mind of a lowly janitor who – for all they know – might as well have had the images planted there to be found. While the facility itself occupies only a tiny fraction of the total area formally leased by Proclus, slightly off the geometric centre, their security patrols jealously guard everything up to the outer fence. And while it may not be more than a kilometre or two to the centre from any outer edge, the aftermath of the quake has made area within a labyrinth of collapsed walls and unstable ground. Direct routes through all that do not exist; one is lucky to get far without having to climb – a couple of those who've tried go so far as to swear the damned architecture actually moves in there. It's not without reason that Proclus's employees are airlifted in. On the other hand, it's a safe guess that the security teams themselves have much better maps of the place, because almost anyone who's tried to get in runs afoul of armed guards with itchy trigger fingers well before they find their destination. The regular police force may not bother with the place, but Proclus takes a very dim view of intruders. It's believed, for example, they have at least one meta-human operative working for them full time, but no-one knows for certain, because no-one who's got a good look at him (or possibly her) has come back to tell the tale. His (or her) existence is mainly inferred from the fact that two different highly qualified meta-human operatives sent in so far haven't come back out.

"Hang on, back up a minute," Eames had said at this point. "This is the same area you said had a population of... how many thousand squatters?"

"Best estimates place it at at least forty thousand."

"Who – one presumes – are coming and going at all hours and who Proclus hasn't shown the slightest interest in displacing?"

"Yes."

"And yet it's your people security always zeros in on?"

"Without fail."

Eames scratched his chin. "How?"

"If we could tell you that, Mr Eames, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation."

"You have tried bribing the locals to sneak you in, at least?"

"It's not an option."

"Why on earth not? These people are living on, what, a price of a sandwich a week? There must be someone in there willing to give you something to work with."

"It's an avenue we've explored," he'd been told, shortly. "It brought us to a dead end. We're looking into other options."

The only remotely optimistic thing he'd heard in that meeting was the general assertion that, given how their security was so focused on keeping anyone from getting near their operations, it appeared they might not have bothered with more than the most elementary measures for inside the facility. 'Optimistic' is by far the only way Eames could think of to describe that assumption.

And that, apparently, was as much as he got to know before signing on officially.

When it had become apparent that no-one was going to answer the obvious question, Eames leant back in his chair and studied Mr Charles and his assistant for any sign they might be much better actors than they seemed to be. It was beyond his imagination to convince himself they were, but he'd missed something in all this, and he hadn't been too proud to ask for it.

"Gentlemen," he'd said, "to be frank with you I haven't the faintest idea why you think I'm your man."

The assistant had made what was probably an attempt to exchange glances with his boss, but Mr Charles had looked right back at Eames when he'd countered, "Let me pose you an alternate question: who would you suggest would be the man for it?"

"Well." Eames had had to think about that. The first two options that come to mind were bound to be ideas that they'd tried already, and it couldn't have been a good sign that next one he'd thought of of was wholly fictional.

"Then you see our problem, Mr Eames," said Charles. Later, this would stand out as being the closest he'd come to displaying a sense of humour in most of their association.

There'd been a bit too much more back and forth along these lines before they get to the point, but Eames did eventually gather he was being hired because,

1\. He was good.  
2\. He was so far from being the obvious candidate that it was spectacularly unlikely that Proclus would have had anyone with his exact skill set in mind when they designed their security.

And possibly also 3. If it did go wrong, he had a much better than average chance of coming back from this alive to try again.

They'd tried obvious. They'd tried subtle. They'd probably even tried thinking outside the box. They'd certainly exhausted 'reasonably priced'. They were down to throwing everything at the wall in the mad hope that anything might stick. This was, not to put too fine a point on it, not the sort of thing Eames liked to hear in these meetings.

But the job had been worth a lot of money, and he couldn't pretend they'd not done a very good job of making him just a little curious about what he might find going on in there. That and the fact he hadn't taken a job that had really stretched him in over a year.

"I'm going to want half my fee in advance," he'd told them in the end, "and the understanding that I make no promises of any kind."

They'd hardly exchange glances before telling him those were perfectly acceptable terms.

* * *

"Any advice?" he'd asked them, before his first outing into the labyrinth.

"Shoot to kill," he was told, deadly serious.

Fifteen minutes before he met the point man for the first time, Eames took his first few steps beyond the outer boundary fence.

Five minutes before, he'd checked his compass for the third time, trying to make sense out of how the hell he'd gotten turned around twice in the last few minutes while doing nothing more challenging than following a straight line down one of few clear stretches of road. His GPS remained stubbornly inactive.

Two minutes after, he'd been well beyond having the temper left to do anything but call it a night.

* * *

Within a matter of hours the body has come back negative for cybernetic implants, negative for tetrodotoxin or any of the known 'zombie' neurotoxins, and negative for surgical scarring, cosmetic or otherwise. The forensics team can't find so much as a filling; by all evidence this was a man in the prime of life and perfect physical health. Give or take the bullet hole in the back of his head.

"They're running tests for the genetic markers that would indicate rapid aging, somatic cell transfer – all the usual jargon, but they tell me we won't have the results for another day, no matter who I threaten to fire," says Charles. "But the reality is that if they've gotten this to work – if you're right and we're looking at a fully realised human clone – then they must be somewhere beyond anything the textbooks can tell us how to look for."

Through the observation window over the theatre, Eames watches a woman in surgical scrubs pull a sheet over what's left of the body. They haven't bothered to sew up the autopsy scars.

He wonders if that's done it, if whatever mysterious force has reanimated this man and sent him back to torment Eames each time thus far could survive being drawn and quartered, sampled, catalogued and sent back for a second opinion. It feels like the wrong question. He's having more than his share of trouble convincing himself that the body split open on the slab below ever belonged to the man who keeps tracking him down in the labyrinthine streets, who's all motion and intent, sleek and agile and breathtakingly efficient even as he's breaking laws so old that most of human history never bothered to name them. Washed out in the harsh glare of surgical lighting, his features are almost unrecognisable as those Eames remembers catching in glimpses between one shadow and the next.

Voyeurism doesn't usually make him this uncomfortable – it's practically in his job description – but then again, he's never faced the problem of how you look someone in the eye after seeing exactly what they look like inside out.

"I don't know why you're asking me," he says to Charles, not bothering to modulate his tone. "For all I can tell you he was one of identical quadruplets."

"Mr Eames," says Charles, with very deliberate patience, "at this point in time the only reason we have to believe that he was anything but an ordinary operative is your word that you've encountered and disabled his duplicates on more than one occasion. We can run every test known to man, but the only way we can be sure is going to require you to bring us a second body to compare."

Eames takes a moment to admire the subtext of that statement. It wouldn't be at all hard to interpret it to imply that this is his chance to fulfil his obligations quickly and be on his way with the rest of his fee by the end of the week. However, it stops short of actually saying as much, leaving his employers free to wait until they have the results in their hands before deciding whether they want him to do more than play a morbid game of fetch to earn his fee, or whether he's already seen too much and should be sent packing before he gets any closer to the truth. He'd be a fool to imagine the latter isn't a real possibility, and as insulting as that might be on a professional level, he'd be an even greater fool to pretend that wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable way to get out of this job. Given the choice, he'd rather be paid for his work than his silence, but money is money, especially in those quantities.

He looks down through the window and tries out the idea that it could be that simple. He's already more than halfway convinced that his half-hearted clone theory is nothing more or less than exactly what Mr Charles expected him to return with from the start, and it has the advantage of being just far-fetched enough to have some merit. The only problem with the idea that he's spent the last three nights killing clones of the first point man is that he knows he saw the man recognise him, and it doesn't matter how many bodies he brings home or how genetically identical the scientists declare them, it's not going to tell Eames why.

"I don't believe that's what you hired me for, Mr Charles," he says, voice careful.

Charles, to his credit, doesn't sound like he's having to deviate too far from his script when he says, "You have something else in mind?"

"I might," says Eames. He hadn't really intended to elaborate on that right away, but Charles is looking at him expectantly and he might as well think aloud as not. "Four nights running now he – or one of his vengeful brothers – has found me within minutes of entry, but I couldn't help but notice your distraction team came through with only a run in with a few armed thugs in security uniforms. I haven't any more idea how they're doing it than you do but the pattern is interesting: it suggests they might be making some clever assumptions about the relative risks posed by one man with the balls to go in solo."

Charles nods, content to follow Eames' logic as far as it goes. "What are you thinking?"

"Tomorrow night, I forge something discrete and go in with your team, and we see if that gets me any further."

"What you may be forgetting there is that my team found trouble and were chased out a good several minutes before you were," says Charles.

"Have a little faith, Mr Charles," says Eames.

* * *

The modus operandi favoured by Mr Charles' people is to make themselves look like a local gang, which is a better strategy for distracting attention away from Fischer's involvement than not attracting attention at all, but it suits Eames' purposes. They last all of six minutes, twelve seconds of picking their way down a two-level street punctuated by intermittent amounts of rubble before meeting trouble tonight, which is hardly a record. After four nights of encounters with the point man, it's bloody anticlimactic that what finds them is nothing more exciting than a five-man team of Proclus's armed security thugs – fairly well matched to Fischer's team, come to think of it. They're passably effective but not especially efficient at their job; it's the work of a minute to separate one out from the pack. A bullet catches Eames in the back of the leg as he runs but it practically bounces straight back out. He hardly even stumbles.

* * *

Out of all the things that could have gone wrong with the plan, having to drag an unconscious man back an extra half a block ranks only high enough to ward off the superstitious feeling it was all going a little too well. The meeting point is an old shed with no door and only one surviving window pane, so close to the edge of the zone that you can see the fence through the back window and, perhaps thanks to a worrying network of cracks in the roof, unoccupied by any of the locals. As long as it can postpone collapse for the next twenty minutes or so that will be more than enough.

Two of Charles' men are there to meet him; one guards the door while the other cuffs the mark's hands and feet together and props him up in a folding chair. They probably don't have more than a few minutes before they're tracked back here, but that's all they'll need. The man is already groaning his way back to the uncertainties of consciousness by the time they have him upright. Eames motions his second man to hold up the torch, props his folding mirrors on a windowsill and is putting the final touches on the security guard's face by the time the man blinks himself awake, squinting stupidly at Eames through a haze of concussion. His only objection is to groan as Eames tilts his chin up to peer through a magnifying lens into each of his eyes.

"Back with us?" says Eames, conversationally.

"Who the..." the man mutters, dealing with very real reason to wonder if his eyes are playing tricks on him. He catches up all at once and jerks against his restraints, mouth twisting into a snarl.

"I know what you are," he says, voice accusing and only slightly slurred. He has a broad American accent to go with his buzz-cut hair and unmemorably ugly features – presumably brought here from the original facility along with the rest of the staff – and a manner that suggests a man who wants nothing more from his job than the chance to re-enact action movie clichés; who probably made it into private security because both the army and police force thought better of hiring him. The ID in his wallet calls him Simon Matthews. Eames is not at all bothered to find himself deciding they probably wouldn't have liked each other even if they had met in much better circumstances.

"I hope you're planning to use the politically correct term," he says, moving around the man and peeling out each of his fingers in turn so that he can peer at their shapes under the torchlight.

"You think you're gonna make this work?" Matthews slurs, clearly having decided to play the role of the tough guy in this scenario. "You think... my buds.... won't know?"

"No really, do go on," says Eames, gesturing. "This is fascinating."

The lopsided twist of Matthews' mouth edges up a notch. "Think I don't know what you're trying to do? You keep me talking long enough, think you can get in here," What was probably meant to be a gesture to point at his head is aborted by the cuffs.

"Give yourself some credit, Mr Matthews," says Eames. "A full profile of a man like you under duress would take me... oh, at least twenty minutes longer than we have to spare." Fortunately for him, there's only one kind of reaction he needs to see tonight.

"Fuck you, you fucking scalper," hisses Matthews. "When they get their hands on you they're gonna tear you... tear you a new..." At the sight of Eames drawing a gun he seems to lose his train of thought.

"For the record, I was going to do this even if you hadn't called me that," says Eames, and shoots him in the leg, taking careful note of the cadence of the man's scream.

* * *

Forgery was in what amounted to its second generation when Eames came to it. Much as it had during the rise and fall of telepathic espionage before them, the world was wising up to the existence of the forgers and learning to take precautions. Biometrics had gone from a niche product to a booming business within the space of a few months. Finger printing, iris scans, retinal scans – within a year or two they were promising on-the-spot DNA verification – technologies that were never before the concern of any but the rich and paranoid were becoming commonplace, and the forgers were going from being well ahead of the curve to struggling to keep up with it. The golden age was over, never to return, and in the faces of the men and women who had pioneered their profession the toll was starting to show.

The temptation is always there in forgery to make improvements to oneself – subtle things mostly, the sort that might just as plausibly be explained away by a more dedicated workout routine, a different brand of moisturiser or a new tattoo. Partial forgeries are looked down on in the business as a general rule, but they're mostly harmless. Certainly anyone who can shift to give themselves the legs of a champion athlete isn't going to hesitate for principle's sake when a job goes bad and they find themselves on the run down a blind alley with a half-dozen armed thugs in pursuit. It's easy to take that sort of thing too far (not for nothing do the flesh scupters of the world have their own repertoire of botox jokes at the forgers' expense) but the long and short of it is that anyone who's likely to make that kind of basic mistake was probably never cut out for forgery in the first place. The greater danger is in the risk of going native, of taking the old adage that to pull off a successful con the first person you must fool is yourself several steps too far.

The first to fall were the ones everyone expected – the man whose extraction plan fell through, turning what was to be a week impersonating a member of the Russian Mafia into four long months, waking and sleeping, sober or drunk, or the woman who fulfilled the excruciating cliché of falling in love with her mark. The ones who couldn't get out until they'd forgotten they wanted to. The nasty surprise waiting in the wings was that anyone could lose themselves in their work just as easily – that sooner or later, most everyone would. In the same learning process by which forgery goes from challenging to routine to deceptively easy, the mind and body begin to show the same strain of any other over-stretched muscle, and things begin to stick. Forgers started to forget they didn't really have a preference for Earl Grey over English tea, that they didn't really blink too slowly when bluffing at poker, that they didn't really grow up in Argentina and have only ever visited South America on business. Before long, they were pouring over old photographs of themselves just to find out exactly what shade of brown their eyes used to be, the way their hair fell over their face when they ducked their heads, how they used to smile at their loved ones. The same men and women who pioneered the business can barely forge themselves anymore, reduced to caricatures of who they might have used to be.

While it might not be obvious to the layperson why this is such a spectacularly terrifying fate, it spells professional suicide. If you can't keep your own persona straight, you've a snowball's chance in hell of managing anyone else's.

You will be by the end of the year is a warning too.

* * *

It's remarkable how little time people will waste on confirming a colleague's identity when they find him lying on the street with a gunshot wound in his leg. After all, everyone knows that even the best forgers can't hold a form with bullet holes in it.

Then again, most forgers don't have the luxury of knowing the bullet stays there only as long as they want it to.

* * *

The fifteen minutes that follow are not among the more enjoyable of Eames' career, carried like a sack of potatoes over a succession of shoulders as the security team weaves its way around the refuse heaps and half-collapsed structures that make up the terrain between them and home. The other men bitch loudly about how completely fucking useless he is, whether he's put on weight, etc, in what is mostly a good-natured attempt to keep him distracted, while Eames grits his teeth and makes himself focus on keeping track of their voices, the route they're following – anything he might need later. It's too dark for him to get a good look at any of their faces, unfortunately.

What people forget about this sort of classic Trojan Horse gambit is that it rather depends on there being some point in the process where the horse is left unattended to get on with it. Sooner or later, he's going to have to cut and run. After a couple of terse radio conversations they've assured him there's a doctor waiting back at base (that 'base' has the facilities to treat a gunshot wound is worth making note of in itself), so it's not going to be that long before some nice person with an expensive medical degree is going to want to take a close look at his leg for him, and Eames may be very good at what he does but that doesn't mean he has any faith in his ability to hold a form while under anaesthetic. He can probably wait until the last minute and fake a panic attack on the table, but it's going to be touch and go. The important part is getting inside; once there he has three pre-prepared personas to choose from, all loyal employees and all known to work long after hours – and his unmatched talent for improvisation. With a little luck, good old-fashioned thievery will take care of the rest.

Naturally, going in with such a detailed and well-formed plan is only asking for something to go wrong, and the first sign of it happening is the sound of the man who's carrying Eames muttering, "Well, look who the fuck it is now."

"He can probably hear you from here, Spencer," says one of the others – Mashiya.

"What?" groans Eames, who is not in a position to have any idea what they're looking at.

"Our friendly company wall-crawler," says Mashiya. "I'll see what he wants."

Spencer makes it loudly and deliberately known he is not going to be stuck holding Matthews' fat ass off the ground while this goes on (and less deliberately known that he's more than a little shaken by the idea that 'the wall-crawler' heard him). By the time Spencer has him down on the ground and moves to give him a clear view, Eames is prepared for the sight of Mashiya talking to the point man. He tries to make up his mind whether he's been expecting this development. He's uncomfortably aware that they never did figure out how this point man has found him every night until now, and it's only the fact he hasn't so much as glanced Eames' way yet that's keeping him from being very worried.

"About my height, dark blonde hair, English accent," the point man is saying. "Bound to be some kind of meta, though I couldn't give you a fix on what."

"Didn't get that good a look at any of them," Mashiya replies, apologetic, "unless Matthews saw the guy who shot him." They both turn to look at Eames.

Eames wants to laugh but sticks to shaking his head, trusting that any expression he's making will pass for a grimace. The point man turns away, but not before Eames catches what can only be frustration stretched across his face.

"I'll take your man in," he says. "I want the rest of you back out there with your eyes peeled."

If Mashiya has any thoughts about being sent out to look for rogue metahumans while leaving an injured man with 'the company wall-crawler', he hides it well. "Yes, sir."

It occurs to Eames, as he's being lifted and slung carefully over the point man's shoulder, that this doesn't necessarily mean that the point man doesn't know who he's really carrying. It's just not like he has any options but to play along even if he does.

* * *

Reverting from forgery back to one's natural appearance is usually considered the easy part of the process. Eames has taken it several steps further than most.

The golden age was well and truly over when Eames started learning forgery; never again would anyone be able to believe they were too good to lose themselves in their own cons. He'd been no more than a rookie when they warned him what his future had in store, and he'd thought no more of it than any other beginner would, drunk on the sheer possibility of the career stretching out in front of him. But within a few weeks more he'd heard enough of the stories – seen enough of the results – to swallow his pride and make himself bury the naïve assurance it could never happen to him. It could and it would, unless he found a way to stop it.

He made a resolution then and there that he was going to keep track of himself no matter what it took, and promptly set about cultivating a narcissistic streak the width of the English Channel. There was no-one he could ever want to be more than Eames, and he made himself believe it.

It wasn't just the indecent number of hours he spent ensconced between his mirrors, revelling in his own imperfections (the crooked teeth, the minute asymmetries of the crinkles around his eyes), learning himself as thoroughly as he would any mark. It was about learning how his body changed by honest means and making certain he kept up. He got all his tattoos done the old fashioned way, always double checking he'd gotten the new ones right whenever he shed a skin. Once in a while when between jobs he'd deliberately ruin his diet, stop his morning runs and let himself go for a months at a time, just to see it happen. He could always tweak the details if anyone he wanted to impress was going to see what he looked like under his shirt (and really, the forger who doesn't bother to see if they can hold shape through an orgasm is in the wrong business).

While he worked at fine-tuning his imitations as hard as anyone else, there was no-one who put as much work into learning to revert back to his own features as Eames did. Perfecting any face he hadn't improvised on the fly became a two-stage process; how to shift in, and how to shift back out – on and off, up and down, until it was coded into muscle memory. An average forger could drop an imitation in seventeen seconds; an experienced one might get it as low as five. Eames could do it in naught-point-four. He worked at it until it was reflex, so easy that he worried a little that some day someone would sneak up behind him and yell 'boo!' and he'd find he'd dropped his carefully crafted forgery on the spot. If it worked, though, it would be well worth that risk.

He'd never had any real idea if any of it would work, mind. But he reasoned that at least if he ever was reduced to messing around with forgeries of himself, he'd know himself well enough to do a better than half-arsed job.

* * *

The next five minutes feel like an hour. Adrenaline is emphatically not his friend today.

Whether because of Eames' weight or his injury or both, the point man keeps his route unusually grounded on the way back. Pressed against the man's body, Eames is very much aware of the tension in the arm wrapped over his hips, the angle of his shoulders, the note of labour in his breathing – that, to put it bluntly, the ability to work around gravity on your own terms doesn't equal true superstrength, and carrying Eames is real work for him. Nonetheless, they're making much faster progress than the security team had managed, so if it seems to Eames that this has gone on forever he has only himself to blame.

It's a good thing he has ample excuse for being tense, because Eames has not in years felt so unprofessional about his ability to control his own reactions mid-forge. No, he hadn't planned for this, but objectively it doesn't make one bit of difference how he gets to the facility. Eames is just having a little difficulty being objective while slung over the shoulder of a man who's shot him on four different occasions and whom he'd seen sliced open on an autopsy table less than twenty-four hours ago. He's forged a thousand marks, bluffed his way effortlessly through a hundred sticky situations, but this is not one he's ever dealt with before.

Eames is never at his most focused when he has a bullet in his leg, no matter how many nerves he's shut off between it and the rest of him, and knowing that it's only paranoia that has him thinking the point man is going to recognise him any second – if he hasn't already – is not helping him relax. The urge to shift back thrums under his skin like a second heartbeat, worse every time a movement jars his leg some uncomfortable way.

The point man stops abruptly. "You hanging in there?" He sounds sympathetic, if not particularly concerned.

Eames groans in answer.

"We're almost there," the point man promises. "I'm just trying to sort out the best way to get us over this wall without shaking you around more than I have to."

"That bad?"

"Nah. Just weighing my options."

It's easy to picture him doing it – the fast way straight over or the slow way around. He's probably used to flying clean over obstacles like this without thinking twice about it. Eames is likely forcing him to think twice about everything just by being here.

"The scientific method, hm?" he mutters.

It takes him a moment too long to realise he said this aloud.

The pause before the point man asks him, "What was that?" is a moment too long too.

That's when Eames panics and shoots him in the back of the head.

* * *

Crawling under the wall is one method that had probably not been in the point man's short list, but when Eames finds the opening that makes it possible after a short limp along the base he's in no condition to be picky. Halfway through he bangs his leg and swears blue murder, though it's not as though there's anyone around to hear him. The point man had been right about how close they were to their destination; from the far side of the wall Eames can see the main gate in the boundary fence that surrounds the main facility – not in a direct line from where he's standing (or rather, leaning), but close enough that he'll be able to make it without trouble, bullet wound or no.

He feels like a right fool, but the thing to focus on is that the mission is salvageable. The guards at the gate will have been close enough to hear the gunshot, and they're very likely expecting him, so when he limps up, alone, with a story about seeing the point man shot out from under him and crawling away without seeing the shooter, they'll probably usher him in quickly and without question. He's actually in the act of pushing himself off from the wall to make his way over when he sees the gate open from the inside to let someone out, and quickly presses himself back into the nearest shadow, out of sight.

It's not much more than gut instinct that makes him hide, but he has ample reason to be glad of it a moment later when he gets a look at the face of the man who's just stepped outside in the glare of the floodlights over the gate.

It's the same man Eames shot in the head not five minutes ago, and not half a block away.

The point man pauses under the light for only a handful of seconds before he vanishes into the gloom of the labyrinth ahead with a start of speed.

Eames is suddenly very glad he's put even a little distance between himself and the place he'd panicked and shot the point man in the head, because it's bound to be a pretty good guess that's where he's heading. It's possible that the point man doesn't know it was the same man he was carrying home who shot him. It's similarly possible that he hasn't just told the gate guards to triple-check Matthews' identity if he shows up. Eames is not about to bet his welfare on either possibility.

It also dawns on Eames that he's still far too close for comfort, and he drops both forgery and leg wound like hot potatoes and runs, as quietly as he can, in the opposite direction.

He spends most of the rest of the night wedged into a crack between two buildings, trusting to any number of deities that he doesn't believe in that they can't possibly look everywhere tonight, can they? To distract himself he passes the time revising his estimates of how much of his kingdom he'd give for a mobile phone, because he wants nothing more than to call Charles up, send him down to the morgue and have him confirm right to Eames' ear that the point man's body is still there, and maybe send him a photograph or two for good measure.

Actually it's probably a good thing he doesn't have a phone, because he'd have another kind of merry hell to deal with deciding whether he dared make even that much noise when he's sure he hears the point man pass by outside too many times to dare coming out.

(He never could decide later whether to count this as their sixth meeting, given that the point man never even saw him, but none since the second had left nearly so much impression.)

* * *

By dawn, Eames is finally feeling confident enough that the search will have been called off to lever himself out of his crack and look around, in time to witness a population estimated at forty thousand getting up and going about their business, mostly headed for jobs in surrounding industrial zones built on firmer foundations. The whole area is well-nigh unrecognisable in daylight, and not least for the sight of a few thousand surprisingly well-dressed and neatly groomed slum-dwellers casually finding sliproads through the chaos of old debris as though doing so posed no more challenge than any other early-morning commute. Eames can blend like nobody's business, but he can't help feeling like the one bug in Escher's House of Stairs that has no idea where it's going and doesn't dare ask for directions. It seems suddenly laughable to remember the game of espionage and gunfire he'd been waging over all these people's heads only hours before.

You did see signs of habitation at night – the odd man or woman out on the streets in the dark, a light shining through a window somewhere (Proclus' presence here does at least mean they've gotten the water and power connected to the mains again, for what good it does the small proportion of the infrastructure here that's still in a condition to make use of it). Nonetheless, it was sometimes a little too easy to forget that virtually any liveable building still standing within the boundaries probably had squatters packed into it like sardines. Why Charles was so sure that one couldn't just walk in here in daylight and take a good look around Eames can't imagine, and he'd have taken some time to give the matter more thought except that any theory he comes up with here and now is only bound to make him paranoid.

The security patrols are still a visible presence on the streets in daylight, but they don't look any more on edge than the bored security detail you see anywhere, and they pay no more attention to Eames than anyone else. In the light of dawn it's suddenly painfully obvious how the point man keeps finding them, night after night, when every time Charles' teams set foot here they must pass within hearing of dozens of people who would happily report the presence of a stranger for a reward. This seems like just the revelation he needed for exactly as long as it takes him to start thinking about all the problematic logistics of a false positive every time a neighbour comes home drunk and noisy, and whether they have some equivalent concept to the shame of being a tattletale in this part of the world, and what proportion of the community would even have access to a working phone, and has to settle on the conclusion that he's only going to drive himself mad trying to make sense of it all.

The most he has to show for the whole night is the knowledge that, however they've found him out in the labyrinth in the past, hiding in one place within only a couple of dozen metres of their base seems to be enough to fool it. He's so close to his goal now that it seems a waste to turn around and walk back out, but without a plan to get inside the facility proper he might as well be back on the outer perimeter. The world may be full of metas for whom an eight-foot concrete wall topped with razor wire poses no obstacle, but Eames was not born to be one of them. Security has found him easily time and again even when he wasn't trying to bypass a structure he can see perfectly well is dotted with discretely placed closed-circuit cameras.

If they haven't already, they're bound to find the real Matthews soon, left out in the open not far from where he was first apprehended, and (hopefully) drugged out of remembering any details of what he'd seen the previous night. Between that and what the point man is bound to have told them about Eames' behaviour they'd be fools not to build some suspicion that the Matthews they almost got back to base last night wasn't the real thing – probably not enough for them to put all the pieces together, but he knows he's blown any chance to get the same gambit to work again.

Even so, he's here, further in than Charles' people have ever been before, and he's earned at least the chance to do some proper sightseeing. Nor is a quick inventory of his position entirely discouraging: he's working on very little sleep and he didn't come in carrying any food or water, but he does have a little money on him and there's bound to be someone around this morning who'll be willing to exchange the latter for the former. For all practical purposes he's got all day to think about what to do next.

He starts by doing a full lap of the facility, making sure to weave in and out of sight at intervals and vary his appearance whenever he moves out of camera range. A clear barrier zone never less than a dozen feet wide separates the outer wall from the nearest extent of the variously decrepit structures that surround it – there's certainly going to be no climbing over it that way. There's no back entrance either, making the main gate the only way in he can see, and even that isn't large – it wouldn't need to be when most of their employees take a helicopter to work. Only security personnel would ever need to go in and out at ground level.

He could probably take on the guards stationed at the gate directly, but with so little idea what he'll find inside he can't risk triggering the alarm before he's made it that far. If he's going to make it through he'll have to start by convincing them that he's a legitimate employee; unfortunately, sneaking onto another security team is out of the question at this point. He won't have nearly the time he'd need to study his forgery target beforehand, and after last night's incident he can count on them to be more suspicious than usual of anyone who seems to be acting a little odd.

On the other hand, there is one employee who Eames has enough familiarity with that he might be able to pull off a convincing forgery – who he's seen coming and going alone through that gate, and who might even wield enough authority to avoid much questioning.

It's the ballsiest plan he's contemplated since he can't remember when, but in the absence of any obvious alternative it's not long before it becomes far too tempting to pass up. It's a risk and a big one, but if he's going to blow this then at least he won't be doing it halfway.

* * *

Eames' mirrors left Proclus' domain with Charles' team, but he can manage just as well without them. Like most forgers he carries them by habit, but he only really uses them to double check the details – and, it must be said, to indulge in a certain amount of vanity at the sight of a forgery well done. Without so much as a reference photo on hand he'll be working from memory, mirrors or no.

He's worn forgeries that sat more comfortably than the point man's skin does tonight, but the sensation that runs through him as he accepts that he won't get to see how this one looks on him before the job is nothing more serious than a little mild disappointment; there's no real doubt in his mind he's done a perfectly good job. He can't actually fly over walls like the real thing so he plans his approach with care – from an angle, he decides, so that the guards won't be able to see him scrambling his way around any of the obstacles that the point man could waltz across.

He's just about to step out of his cover into the wide gap that separates the facility from the edge of the old industrial zone when he hears the unmistakeable sound of a gun being cocked.

"Don't move, please, Mr Eames," says a voice.

Eames goes very still. It's a reaction that has only a little to do with the instruction, or the gun, or the fact he hadn't even heard anyone coming, and everything to do with the rug-from-under-his-feet rush of vertigo that comes with hearing his name on the point man's lips.

"Now I want you to turn around – slowly. We both know one bullet won't take you down, but we can always see how you deal with the whole clip."

"I'd rather not find out," Eames admits, hating the way his voice shakes, and rotates around in a tight circle. Running into the real thing had always been a risk he was prepared to take, but this is something else altogether. He hasn't been made to raise his hands and his gun is tucked into his pants at the small of his back; he could draw it in less than the space of a second, but with the point man watching his every move he doesn't feel nearly brave enough to try it.

He finishes turning to see the other man standing a few feet out of his reach, a gun raised in his outstretched arm and pointed at Eames' head. The point man takes in the sight of his own features on Eames' body consideringly. There's little if any trace of surprise in his expression; he almost has the air of someone judging a spectacle arranged for their amusement.

"Impressive work," he says. Then, just as thoughtfully, he pulls the trigger.

The next thing Eames hears is the point man's voice saying, "Forty seven seconds. I had it right the first time, didn't I? The chest shots didn't take you down for nearly as long."

Eames opens his eyes, already enjoying his usual splitting headache – only magnified thanks to his having not actually slept in the last twenty four hours. The point man is crouching over where Eames is lying on the ground, the better to keep his gun trained between Eames' eyes, and holding Eames' gun in his other hand. Any lingering sense memory of being patted down while he was out is lost under the headache.

"Are you always this sadistic?" Eames demands. Diplomacy is only going to go to waste on a man who will apparently shoot him for nothing more than his own amusement.

The point man shrugs, unapologetic. "If you think back to last night you'll find I owed you one. You've built quite the reputation on your ability to survive headshots."

And isn't there a wealth of meaning behind that statement. Even without Eames' stupid mistake it probably wouldn't have taken a lot of extrapolation to guess that the forger who could hold shape with a bullet in his leg and the man who'd traded bullets with the point man four times in the last few days might be one and the same, and that's a set of defining features that define Eames very narrowly, but to have tracked down his name with only that to go on within the space of twenty-four hours is no mean feat.

"You've got me at something of a disadvantage here," Eames admits, weakly.

The point man raises his eyebrows, appearing to consider this. "It's Arthur," he says.

Eames has the nasty feeling he's missed something. "...what is?"

"That was me evening up your disadvantage," explains the point man, slowly.

"Well, I'm much obliged, Arthur, but it hasn't exactly been the mystery of your name that's been keeping me up at night lately." Eames fails rather spectacularly at modulating his tone, but the point man appears irritatingly unfazed by any of it.

"You're talking about what happens to me when I'm shot?" he asks.

A response seems superfluous at this point.

"Have you ever died in a dream, Mr Eames?"

"I suppose." Eames tries to decide if this is the non-sequitur it seems to be.

"What happened?" prompts the point man.

"I woke up, in bed, with a cold sweat and a pounding heart and all the other usual clichés."

"There's your answer, Mr Eames." The point man is almost whispering. "That's what happens to me."

"I'm fairly sure neither one of us is dreaming." Eames is, in point of fact, suddenly a lot less sure of this than he wants to be.

"So am I." The light is not quite good enough for Eames to tell if he's smirking. "But there it is – shoot me, and I wake up. Safe in bed."

He seems casual, but Eames can only think of one reason why this... this Arthur would be telling him all this, and it doesn't bode well for his future. He probably has a decent chance of surviving the whole clip; he'd be happier not to find out given the choice, but he's bet his life on worse odds. The trouble is that there's no reason to assume the point man will stop there if it doesn't work. He doesn't think he could survive a beheading, for example, and the only reason he's not entirely certain is that no-one has ever tried it before.

Unless the real reason is that the point man is assuming that Eames won't have the first idea what to do with the information, and the worst of that is he's right.

Eames realises he's gaping at the point man like a beached fish and quickly shuts his mouth. But before he can come up with an actual response to whatever the hell is going on, there's the sounds of footsteps and voices closing in – more security summoned by the sound of the gunshot, no doubt.

"It's alright," Arthur calls to them, rising to his feet, and gesturing with a wave of his gun for Eames to do likewise. "I've caught our thief."

* * *

The part Eames had tried not to dwell on back when he was putting the finishing touches on his strategically cultured narcissism was how much it was all long-term planning of the most optimistic kind when, statistically speaking, he had perhaps even odds of living long enough for it to matter. Forgery did not make one any more invincible than any other mortal human, and actually left one considerably less fit for combat situations than most other common meta-abilities. The people they tended to be hired to fool were rarely happy to discover a forger in their midst, and even when the forger themselves didn't slip up (and everyone slipped up eventually), it was not uncommon for a forger to find out the hard way just how many enemies the people they impersonated really had. Background research is half the job, and even more so when one's clients are regularly inclined to understate the risks involved.

Even then, you didn't always research the right person, or Eames might have found out before it was too late that the man hiring him for the Moldez job had been working for Mr Christopher Moldez himself all along, in an elaborate plan to stage his own death in front of multiple witnesses and a video camera with Eames in the starring role.

He was not, put simply, expecting the job to end with a hitman shooting him in the head.

He was expecting it even less when he'd panicked, shifted back into himself on reflex, and discovered that what his subconscious had been trained to recognise as 'himself' was now conspicuously free of bulletholes.

Among the things everyone knows about forgers is that the fastest way to force them to lose form is to punch a hole in them, so the one good thing to be said about Moldez's plan was that it had been staged so that he'd drop out of direct sight behind a table after being shot, and that had given him the crucial seconds he'd needed to pull himself together, get his head around some sort of provisional understanding of how conspicuously not dead he seemed to be, and crawl away. How he'd gotten out of the building afterwards always remained a blur. If he hadn't gotten hold of a copy of the video footage later, he might never have been able to make himself believe it had happened at all.

For a long time afterwards (and this was even not counting the time it took to track Moldez down and explain to him exactly how Eames had felt about the affair) he'd been understandably reluctant to tempt fate by testing to see whether it would work again. But when at last he did work up the nerve to bite the not-particularly-proverbial bullet – and how that happened was a story in itself – the results were all that mattered.

Severe head injuries would remain his least favourite aspect of his new abilities, always guaranteeing him a world of discomfort, but anywhere else on his body a bullet hardly slowed him down. Whether or not he was wearing his own face beforehand made little difference – Eames shifted right back into his own skin, good as new. He stopped short of actually chopping off a finger to see if he could grow it back (he was curious, just not that curious), though if life ever gave him the chance, well, a week or two of calcium supplements and protein shakes, and who knew? The unexpected side-effect of cultivated narcissism had been to convince his own system he was invincible.

The euphoria over this discovery lasted only as long as it took for him to catch himself shedding a practice forgery to heal himself from nothing more serious a stubbed toe, and the extra months it took to train himself not to shift on reflex for non-life-threatening injuries were... not the most enjoyable part of his career, to say the least. By the time he was done refining that aspect of his new talents to the point of pulling off the trick that let him keep a bullet in his leg for half an hour while forged, it seemed a small price to pay.

(He usually glosses over most of that when he tells the story. How he discovered himself to be immortal after being shot in the head makes an excellent story – the months of tentatively feeling out his limits it took before he dared trust it, not so much.)

How widely he ought to publicise his new invulnerability was a matter Eames had been in two minds about ever since, even among the tight circles of his few trusted contacts. It's a diplomatic issue as much as anything else; of the dozen-or-so common meta-abilities (and the few dozen more less common ones), none came close to offering the bearer true invulnerability – and least of all forgery. It's one of the few reliable rules of Eames's world that no matter if you're against an opponent who can run up the side of a building or walk through a wall, a bullet to the head will still get the job done, and he'd probably feel guilty about ruining that for the world if he hadn't been so terribly fond of staying alive. On a more grounded level, there was real reason to worry that his ability to play dead convincingly would be severely compromised if people knew there was a forger out there who could un-forge a bullethole. On the other hand, there was just no fun in having a uniquely specialised skill if no-one knew to hire you for it, and it didn't take a genius to see that the applications could go well beyond being able to afford to take more risks than he used to. As unpleasant and tedious as he may have later found his developing side-business in voluntarily helping clients fake their own deaths, the money was excellent. Not something he'd want to get used to doing too often for all manner of reasons, but well worth the necessity of sharing a few secrets.

He wonders now and then whether any forger could learn the same trick, given a few pointers to get them started, or to what degree he'd be qualified to teach someone else how to do what he himself had only stumbled on by accident. He's always got one ear open for rumours of anyone else who might have hit on the same revelation – he knows he's not the only forger in his generation to dream up similar methods to avoid losing himself in others' faces. Oft times it seems inevitable that he can't be so unique, that the secret will get out eventually no matter how much care he takes. The third generation of forgery may well be the one that comes in the wake of the world discovering that forgers aren't nearly so fragile as they used to be.

But after five years being Eames, the one and only, and not so much as a whisper that anyone else in the world has learned to do what he does, Eames had stopped assuming it was inevitable and started to wonder if there was ever going to be anyone else to hit on his strange brand of immortality. It's one of the few facts of forgery is that no two people approach it in quite the same way; another forger might well be able to replicate every step of Eames' process without achieving the same result. In a world with so few shapeshifters and even fewer forgers, maybe there is only the one of him. He's a better chance of making to retirement than most of his ilk, but thoughts of some day taking on some young protege to pass on his secrets becomes a lot less appealing when set against the question of how many young proteges he'll need to go through before he finds one who'll master his tricks before they get him or her killed.

He's not lonely. Invulnerability is no kind of curse.

There are just some days when it all seems a bit too easy to be any challenge anymore, like the world has let him down.

* * *

The security team that had found him at the point man's mercy don't seem to know what to do with him at first. Taking prisoners probably isn't something anyone working here has had to do before.

Underdeveloped as the details may have been in Eames' plan to get inside Proclus' facility, being led through the hallways at gunpoint with cuffs on his hands and a bag over his head were definitely not part of them.

Eames goes quietly. There are a lot of guns pointed at him, at least a couple at his head, and Arthur has already demonstrated his willingness to remind the prisoner of his place. Between the headache, the indignity and the pressing distraction of how very much trouble he's in, it isn't until well after they've got him inside that a couple of oddities in the proceedings stand out enough to make him wonder, and begin to reassess some of his assumptions about exactly which details the point man has told his colleagues about his encounters with Eames thus far. The men forming his escort are clearly aware that shooting Eames does not work, but Arthur has at least had the decency not to demonstrate this for any skeptics in their numbers. No-one in his hearing has discussed the possibility of any more creative ways to deal with him, beheading or otherwise – in fact, the general buzz of hushed conversation suggests that shooting him at all is being treated like a last resort. Eames is so grateful for that that it takes a while for him to notice that he hasn't heard anyone use the word 'forger' since they picked him up either, and he's been listening very carefully.

He has no secrets from Arthur, that much has been made very plain, whereas he still hasn't more than half-formed suspicions about how a man he's seen dissected on a slab keeps coming back, night after night. But if he didn't know better, he'd think that the rest of Proclus' security team are labouring under the assumption that he and Arthur are the same kind of creature, and that Arthur is letting them. Arthur really doesn't seem like the sort of person to forget to clarify something like that.

He's on the tail end of that thought when he's hustled through a doorway (he knows this, because he was allowed to stub a toe on the frame on the way in), and handcuffed to what feels like some sort of wall-fixing. There is the sound of footsteps retreating away, then of a door being shut and locked, then more footsteps at a greater distance until they fade out of hearing.

After a couple of tries, he succeeds in shaking the bag off his head without anyone stopping him. He's in what looks like a disused office, paint peeling off the walls and bare of furniture but for one table and a wheelie chair with its back missing. Outside the door, someone coughs once, and then there's silence.

That, it appears, is the limit to the resources they've seen fit to spend keeping him here. Eames would be insulted if he wasn't so busy fishing a lock pick out of the cuff of his sleeve.

* * *

Fischer's people may have actually been right with their guess that Proclus' entire security budget had gone into external measures. The highest security Eames has so far encountered in here is a locked door.

He can't have long before someone discovers that their improvised cell now contains one (1) unconscious guard and no Eames, but in the meantime, Eames is taking his time to explore the facility under the guise of the eminent Dr Marianne Kochevski, an employee who is, based on the ridiculous hours that she works, either fanatically devoted to her work or merely forever slightly behind her deadlines (with a number of hours spent studying all the surveillance Mr Charles has on her, Eames' money is on a combination of the two).

The corridors are all but empty this time of night, the only other staff he encounters hardly nod to him as he goes past. Given the surprisingly real suspicion he's nursing that almost no-one here has the faintest idea there's a forger involved it all seems a little too easy.

It would be nice if he had more than the vaguest idea where to look.

* * *

The eighth time they meet, Eames finds Arthur sleeping in an infirmary bed behind a locked door. He's lying on his back with his arms by his sides, laid out like a body arrayed for a final viewing, too neat for natural sleep. There's a heart monitor beeping away on the shelf above him, reading a beat so slow that Eames almost startles at the first noise it makes, and an IV line running from a saline bag on a stand to his left wrist, the sight of the bare arm lying over the covers adding a strange of vulnerability to the scene that no other detail quite achieves. Eames is relatively certain it will take more than a shake to the shoulder to wake him up.

"Weren't you wearing a different shirt earlier, Marianne?"

Eames almost – literally – jumps out of his skin, and whips around to the sight of Arthur standing behind him. He's wearing the same tightly buttoned black ensemble that Eames has gotten used to seeing in outline against the shadow of his body whenever they encounter one another outside, and he's carrying a loose-leaf folder under one arm. Eames hadn't even heard him come in.

He can't stop himself from darting a glance to the bed and back again, one Arthur to the other. If he's honest with himself he's been expecting... something very much like this for a long while now, but faced with the proof he's left at a loss for words. Where do you even start?

Arthur watches him put it together with what may be the most frustrating poker face Eames has encountered for a long time, then pulls his gun from the holster on his hip and flicks off the safety.

The sight drags Eames back to himself very quickly, the pleasantly tired features of Dr Kochevski tumbling from his body. "Christ, you do realise you could just ask me if you want to speak to my face," he blurts out, words almost tumbling over each other. He's still got the headache from the last time they did this.

Arthur raises his eyebrows at Eames, very slightly, which should really be far too small a gesture to convey that much amusement. "I wasn't planning on shooting you. We're even, remember?"

"Then-" Eames starts, stopping as Arthur flicks the gun over in his hand and holds it out to him, the barrel pointing back towards his own body.

"You wanted to know what happens when I get shot?" he offers.

Eames swallows, but he takes the gun and presses the muzzle to Arthur's temple. "You're sure?"

Arthur closes his eyes. It's no gesture of trust; this is a man with absolutely nothing to fear.

Eames pulls the trigger and Arthur drops like a stone. Over the echoes of the gunshot, Eames hears the beeping of the heart monitor speed up.

He turns to the bed in time to see Arthur opening his eyes. He takes a couple of seconds to reorient himself, then he's pushing the covers back and swinging his legs to floor, his new body dressed only in a thin hospital gown. He treats Eames to a quick glance before applying himself to the serious business of fishing a packet of cotton buds out of a drawer and sliding the IV needle out of his wrist with the efficient movements of someone who's done all this a hundred times before.

"Are you satisfied with your answer, Mr Eames?" If he's experiencing even the slightest headache or nausea for his stunt he's hiding it so well Eames can't spot it, and he suddenly finds himself obscenely jealous. This may be one of the reasons why the next thing he does is to point the gun back at Arthur's head.

"So what happens if I pull the trigger now?" he asks, with no real idea whether he means to.

"You'll hear a click, indicating to you that there aren't any bullets left in the clip." Arthur looks up, meeting Eames' eyes properly. "Each of these bodies costs nearly twenty thousand dollars to produce. You've already cost my employer quite enough over the last week."

Eames takes a second to do the maths behind that one, suddenly seeing each time he's shot Arthur thus far in a shockingly mercenary light. "If it's any consolation, I'm costing my own employer considerably more than that."

"Fischer?" says Arthur. Before Eames can deny it, he adds, "We know, Eames. We've known all along. If anything, I think Saito's been deliberately baiting him to see how far he'll go."

"Well," says Eames. There doesn't seem much point in pretending otherwise.

Arthur jerks his chin towards where his old body is lying behind Eames on the floor. "Under my arm – those should be the files you came here for."

Eames is getting used to the constant urge to gape at every other thing Arthur says. He tugs the folder free of the used body's grasp and flicks through the contents. He's no way of knowing if it's genuine, except that, painfully unreadable as he's finding Arthur, he just can't quite make himself believe he'd be that obvious.

"Why?" You let me in here. You showed me what you can do. You gave me all of this.

Arthur, for once, has the decency to look a little sheepish. "It's going to go straight to your head if I tell you you've been the most interesting part of my job since you showed up, isn't it?"

Eames snaps the folder closed and tries out the idea that this is, actually, happening to him. For the first time in days he's feeling like he has his balance back, and that's almost definitely why his reply comes out as, "Might not be my head you need to worry about that going to, dear."

Arthur actually laughs at that, short and startled. He shakes his head, and for a moment he looks like he's about to say something else, but then he checks himself, the smile fading. He pushes himself up off the bed, reaching for the new set of clothing that sits folded on a chair beside it. "There must be at least half a dozen people on the way to see where that gunshot came from by now," he says, and sounds like he regrets it. "I'll give you a two minute head start."

Eames hesitates.

Arthur waves him away. "Go on, Eames. You don't get paid unless you make it back intact. You've already wasted your first fifteen seconds."

Not for the first time that day, Eames has no idea what to say, so in the end he doesn't; just slips the good doctor's face back on and slips out of the room.

* * *

Whatever game they're playing now, it's far too late to go back by the time Eames realises that Arthur hadn't gotten as far telling him what the rules are. Presumably, he's expected to lead Arthur on another chase through the labyrinth, his skill against Eames, may the best man win, and all that. He's really not sure what he expects Arthur to do if he catches him again.

But the simple truth is that even with a two minute head start, there's no way he's going to make it. He's not even sure he's going to get out of the gate with any of his pre-prepared forgeries and the thick folder he's carrying under his arm.

Instead, Eames heads for the roof, where the good people of Proclus Global have helpfully stationed a waiting helicopter complete with bored pilot enjoying a quiet smoke against the wall out of the wind. He's prepared to explain in no uncertain terms exactly what will happen to the pilot if he doesn't feel like cooperating, but it turns out that Dr Kochevski is in the habit of flying back and forth at odd hours of the night on such a regular basis that she hardly even gets a blink when she turns up wanting a ride home.

Eames has never been inclined to pay much attention to a gift horse's tonsils, but all the way back he can't shake the awful feeling that he's cheating.

* * *

He doesn't look inside the file again before delivering it to Mr Charles, who takes all of fifteen seconds to rifle through its contents in Eames' presence before vanishing into his office. Within an hour, one of his underlings is telling Eames that the remainder of his fee has been transferred into his account and showing him the door.

He doesn't know what else Arthur expected him to do.

And with that, apparently, it's all over.

* * *

The fee from the Fischer job is enough to keep Eames living in relative luxury for the rest of the year. Within a week, he's gambled two thirds of it away at a series of casinos in Monte Carlo, and he's not even sure he hadn't meant to.

Morals haven't given Eames any serious concern in more than two decades, but what on earth he'd be doing living it up on money that was practically handed to him on a platter by an employee of the very organisation he was infiltrating he can't figure out. He takes a job while he's there, small potatoes stuff (forgery, with just enough of a risk of being shot at to make it interesting), and completely fails to distract himself from the state of his head with work.

By the time he comes around to the admission that he's felt like he left unfinished business in Johannesburg ever since he left, a month has gone by, and the first thing he sees on the news is that Proclus has closed down their whole facility overnight, citing untenable expenses, and disappeared. Fischer's name remains absent from the media.

Eames decides he never did like South Africa anyway.

So he does what he always does – he puts it out of his mind, and gets on with it.

* * *

Eames has enough of a reputation that he can afford to be difficult to find and still know that work will find him as often as he wants it (and not too much more so, generally, or he'd work harder at making himself harder to find). One of the ways it finds him is through Matilda, who was a very average forger once upon a time, up until the day she decided that her true talents lay instead in the business of knowing everyone else and how to get in contact with them, which she found infinitely more lucrative and considerably less risky. She's probably still a very average forger, Eames hasn't seen her face to face in years, and mostly suppresses the urge to tease her about it.

She does have uncannily good timing in amongst her new skill set, so Eames doesn't think anything of it when she calls him up within twenty four hours of him completing his latest job – the third he's done in the two months since the Fisher job, and the least exciting yet.

"Please tell me this is going to be more challenging than the last one," he begs her, over the phone. "And by challenging, of course what I mean is 'lucrative'."

"How challenging do you find espionage?" says Matilda.

"Corporate?"

"Think more a long the lines of second-world war zone."

"Oh, excellent," says Eames. "Where do they want me to meet them?"

They want him to meet them in an upmarket hotel, which is one of the more civilised options for their profession. His contact is a man called Dominick Cobb who meets him at the door ("The Dominick Cobb?" he'd asked Matilda. "Very funny, Eames," she'd said. "And no, I've never heard of him before either."). He's thirtyish and well-dressed, and projects an aura of competence and trustworthiness that probably inspires many marks to entrust him with their darkest secrets within hours of their meeting. He shakes Eames by the hand in the doorway, and invites him in to meet the rest of his team.

Eames is very good with names, though he blanks spectacularly as Cobb gets to the part that goes, "...though I gather you've met Arthur already. He assures me you're the best forger he's ever worked with."

Eames knows a few different Arthurs. The one now stepping forward to shake his hand is the one he's least likely to ever forget.

The first proper thought he manages is something like of course – this was how it was meant to go. The second is probably crazy, but he's too giddy not to wonder just a little whether two minutes and two months would sound so very different when you're stressed enough to hear whatever you expect.

"I'm looking forward to working with you again, Mr Eames," Arthur says, with a smile full of secrets. "You're a hard man to track down."

"Even for a man of your talents?" Eames says, and he's running on automatic, really, but idle banter has been second nature all his life. "I'm going to have to take that as a compliment."

"You should," says Arthur, and finally releases his hand.

 


End file.
